News and Open Source Releases

Tech blogs and security mailing lists have been abuzz this past week with discussions regarding a series of security flaws called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS). These vulnerabilities could be used by a local attacker or process to read privledged data from the CPU cache. The issues appear to affect multiple processors and operating systems. Distributions have already begun publishing updates to address the flaws. The Red Hat website offers details on the MDS issue: "Four new microprocessor flaws have been discovered, the most severe of which is rated by Red Hat Product Security as having an Important impact. These flaws, if exploited by an attacker with local shell access to a system, could allow data in the CPU's cache to be exposed to unauthorized processes. While difficult to execute, a skilled attacker could use these flaws to read memory from a virtual or containerized instance, or the underlying host system..."

Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the Star Lite, Star LabTop and more. Available with a choice of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Zorin OS pre-installed with many more distributions supported. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.